Tears of the Begums (Begamat ke Aansoo): Stories of 1857

Hasan Nizami lived in Delhi among the survivors and their children, and he wrote down their stories in short, vivid pieces: a prince who works as a butler in a hotel, The Prince Turned Butler; the daughter of Mirza Mughal; princesses begging in the bazaar; a mother giving birth in flight; an orphan prince's Eid; and the story of a daughter of the last emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar. The book closes with the author's 1930 afterword, Everyone's Tears.

The stories mix memory, report and the author's own commentary. They are not history in the academic sense, but they preserve the voices and the feelings of people the histories forgot.

Hasan Nizami's Urdu is simple, rhythmic and intensely emotional. He was a Sufi of the Nizamuddin shrine, and his writing has the cadence of a storyteller addressing listeners. The book was reprinted again and again in his lifetime, and readers still turn to it as the most moving account of 1857 from the losing side.

Hasan Nizami wrote many more pieces about 1857 that were never added to this book. Eleven of them are collected on this site as Writings of 1857. See also our guide to Khwaja Hasan Nizami.